The Panic Years Quotes

“Fertility is such a difficult feminist issue because our biology hasn't caught up with our politics.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“I couldn't rely on a man to control his fertility. Pregnancy happened in my body and so it was up to me to make sure it didn't happen. I couldn't expect a man to carry an equal share of the discomfort, the misery, the weight. I couldn't lie back and assumed he had it covered: I had to be the backstop, the sensible one, the person who carried the can.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: no man who has ever voted against abortion could handle being pregnant. Not one of those ham-faced assemblages of fear, misogyny and idiocy could handle having their skin, muscle and bones torn apart by an unborn child. Not one of them would undergo three months of daily vomiting, existential terror, occasional bleeding, constant nausea and unshakeable fatigue, followed by another six months of aching joints, short breath, decreased mobility, near-incontinence, fear and exhaustion for the sake of something that may not even survive. Not one of them could give up their status, their ability to work, their financial security, their freedom of thought and movement, their whole previous way of life, in order to grow something in their bodies that they never even wanted – it is hard enough when you do want it.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years

“By telling people, particularly women, that they could have it all if they just tried hard enough, we somehow took the onus off our employers to create workplaces in which that was actually possible.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“For people already in the together-forever camp—the people who had bought houses together, gotten married, were trying for a baby, had already become parents—my life was a perfect encapsulation of everything they had traded in. I had freedom, I had variety, I had a healthy disregard for my own security. While they planned a babysitter and an evening of bottle-feeds two weeks in advance just so they could spend three hours out of the house eating a dinner they hadn’t cooked, I was rampaging up a dew-wet meadow with someone who might try to undo my bra with his teeth. It was only later, as I sat on their sofas, ashen-faced and nails-bitten, telling them how I’d faked an orgasm or risked an STI or how I’d cried in the night because I’d felt so lonely, that I would catch them looking over at their partner with something like relief.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Here we are, in 2020, still without male equivalents to ...[the] pill, implant, injection, IUD. Here we are with a female pill that is simply not fit for purpose, making women in their millions....depressed, anxious, suicidal, sick, panicked, overweight, in pain and all the other myriad side effects discussed in private WhatsApp groups and late night confessions around the world. Here we are with a modern fuck culture that keeps men in a state of sexual immaturity their entire adult lives.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“It is on this bedrock of inequality that so much of the Panic Years takes root. Fertility, freedom, what control a woman can expect over her future, the balance of power within relationships, who faces the greater sacrifice in parenthood, whose career takes precedence, what level of physical discomfort you should be expected to accept and who, ultimately, gets to make the big decisions are all skewed by this early view of sex, contraception, pregnancy and parenthood.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“It is about why you find yourself doing the Panicked Math that if you meet someone, and you date for a year, and if it takes two years to get pregnant, but if you were to aim for this job, and if your period started at thirteen, and your mom's eggs ran out at forty... until suddenly you're not doing math anymore but asking something bald and blank and unending: Who am I and what do I want from life?”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“What does it mean for a working woman in an unaffordable country facing a climate disaster to commit to a partner, let alone the future of a child?”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“The Flux is the gap between adolescence and midlife, during which women lose that constructed artifice of control over their lives, confront their fertility, and build themselves new identities.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“We shield men from the reality of fertility, family, and female desire, because we have been conditioned to consider them uninteresting or unattractive. Throughout my twenties and into my thirties, I tried desperately to appear casual and carefree, believing that any hint at my true, complicated desires—in my case, for love, commitment, independence, a successful career, and ultimately a baby too—would render me single forever. I silenced myself, because I thought it made me more attractive. I tucked my weaknesses, my wants, and my womb out of sight.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Although he was physically present, somehow it felt like he hadn't yet arrived; his great classy eyes were unseeing, his mind was unknowable, his soul - if such a thing exists - hung suspended elsewhere. I cared for his body, attended to his every need, felt wolfishly protective - but for the first six weeks, until he started to focus, smile, respond to my voice, have periods of waking that were not filled with howling anguish, i found it hard to know him. Let alone love him.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“You can still hear the phrase 'tricked into having a baby' with horrifying regularity, as though ejaculation and insemination were entirely a woman's fault or choice. Or 'waiting until he's ready', as though a woman's own readiness, hope and intention were immaterial.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Thanks to the wonders of modern contraception...we can pretend that all women are magically, invisibly, and easily infertile until they, and perhaps also their partner, decide they want to have a baby.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“To see contraception as anything other than a feminist issue is to argue that the sea isn't wet.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“I couldn't wait any longer. I was being asked to wait for something as intangible, ephemeral and insubstantial as a feeling; for him to feel ready. But in my body, I was fighting the visceral, bloody truth..”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“With a voice that was as raw as it was wild, I explained that I had imagined having a baby since I was eight years old, six years old, maybe even longer. Could he imagine if he had wanted one thing, since he'd been a tiny boy in his Arsenal pyjamas, until now?”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“I asked Nick to imagine what it must feel like to have the one person you love most in the world denying you the one thing you want more than life itself; to have your entire life put on pause by someone else's uncertainty; to be asked to keep your body on hold - knowing that time will run out, because someone else doesn't want to have to think about it right now.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“The idea that it was their sperm, and not my womb, that should be altered in some way to prevent a pregnancy clearly didn't occur to them. ..Honestly, I could have a dozen children by now, all fathered by men who assumed I 'had it covered'.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“The fact was that of every single man I have ever had sex with, none of them had ever taken the whole responsibility for not getting me pregnant. Some of them might have asked if I was on the pill; some of them might have asked if I was 'using anything', but a huge number of them didn't even do that.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Years of bad conditioning had taught me that men have babies only under duress, women are responsible for what happens in their womb and that asking men for something you want makes you vulnerable to rejection.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Newspapers, politicians, teachers, television dramas and Thomas Hardy novels had all taught me that getting pregnant was what stupid, careless, or conniving women did. It was what mad women did to trap men, what poor women did to get council houses, what stupid women did because they Hadn't Known Better. Getting pregnant was something selfish, disgusting, or unfair that ruined men's lives, curtailed their youth and was the woman's fault entirely.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Even at seventeen, I had been conditioned to believe that it was up to me, and me alone, to not get pregnant. Never mind that I was bloated and miserable from being on the pill. Never mind that the pressure to take it every day hung over me like a threat.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Very little has really been done to interrogate whether the pill is even fit for purpose.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“In my case, the link between oral contraception and a mental health nosedive seemed indisputable. Like the drip, drip, drip of a tap in the night I was slowly, daily, regularly putting something down my throat that was making me lose control of my body and my mind. I didn't want it any more. I didn't want any of it any more.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“So I got the copper coil; a tiny, hormone-free utensil that would keep me as magically, invisibly, uncomplainingly infertile as I believed all women in their twenties myst be in order to live full lives and for men to love them.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“Without Nick's brick wall to kick against, I may have been forced to confront my own ambivalence, concerns, doubts about motherhood.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“..By committing to somebody who feels differently to you, you are unconsciously forcing yourself to examine, question and ultimately defend your own position. It forces you to be definite when you're not actually feeling definite at all. If Nick had blithely said he wanted a baby any time I fancied, then I would have had to confront the reality of having a baby fair sooner.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“How you feel about having a baby is so personal, so profound and pushed so deeply down into your own complicated tapestry of being that you cannot believe that anyone you love, really love, doesn't somehow feel the same.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“I thought of the uneasiness with which I watched my early boyfriends rip open condoms, wondering if he might be about to destroy my A-Levels.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions